Talk:Terran Class
The Trouble with Retcons... Is that it's really easy to screw things up. Looking through old file archives earlier today I found some long lost CAD files for the Terran I & II Cruisers. After studying them I realised that I may have got the scale wrong on the Terran I. The idea for the two ships were more or less that the "I" was Frigate sized and the "II" was scaled up to Light Cruiser sized. The Terran class started out as your basic explorer starship that could do everything, though not well, while the Mark II was a warship. My original files peg the Terran class at 415 meters in length, while the data I initially put up on the wiki was 470m. I don't really recall if the increase in size was done intentionally at the time. Because of this I'm working on the assumption that I screwed up. I'm looking for opinions on which would make more sense for an earlier explorer ship. Would it have been a smaller or larger one? The jump in scale from 470m on the Mk I to 611m on the Mk 2 doesn't seem quite as severe to me as from the smaller design. However a smaller ship makes more sense because of the lower tech levels at the time. What say you anons? -ThatSlowTypingGuy (talk) 05:15, February 23, 2017 (UTC) Personally, I think for an exploration ship that's designed to be on the longesty voyages, a larger ship would make sense. You could squeeze in a bit more fuel, equipment, etc that could mean it's out in space for another few months or so. I honestly don't think the increase in size would be that much of a technological leap, Nimitz class aircraft carriers are already 345m long, and I fully understand there's differences between a sea ship and space ship, but it's somewhat related in terms of materials and design stresses. 06:28, February 23, 2017 (UTC) With a ship that might be on exploration missions for years, or might have to wait months before any help can reach their location, making it as large as technically possible seems like a good idea. Lots of new technology would require lots of spare parts, more redundant systems, and more supplies in case anything goes wrong and they might have to wait months before any help can get to their position. I'd also imagine dead explorers are tough to sell for a democratic government if their deaths can be blamed on cost cutting measures. Might end a few political careers prematurely, and it's not the politicians' money that's spent on these ships anyway. 14:30, February 23, 2017 (UTC) The Anons above make good points on 'bigger is better', and I must generally agree with them. That said, could the smaller size of the ship be directly related to FTL Material/Systems limitations of the time? If you can't (economically or safely) produce a warp bubble beyond a certain size due to tech limits or lack of specialist materials, you build your exploration ship to fit into that. When you suddenly need military ships to defend yourself, you start ignoring some of those economic or safety limits to squeeze every bit of fight and armor into that new, bigger military ship that you absolutely must have. In turn, that generally propels advances to cut the costs longer term, and the smaller class naturally grows due to 'bigger is better' reasons or those upgrades mentioned on the ship's page. (76) February 23, 2017 -''Things like FTL Material/Systems limitations of the time were exactly what I meant by "lower tech levels at the time." The Terran class were the largest starships built by humanity when they were first launched. '' Go with the larger one seems to be the consensus though. I can just say the smaller design was a sublight testbed or something. --ThatSlowTypingGuy (talk) 16:10, February 23, 2017 (UTC) Why not make that part of the class history? It's a common thing for prototypes, proof of production models, and test-beds to be a great deal smaller than the final, used variant. See the F-117 program for details, the Jet jumped up by almost 50% in size after they found the prototypes too small to deal with the bomb and electronics requirements. You could do something similar here, perhaps the maths dictated the ship would work at the bigger size, but it was still untested? It would make for an interesting history for the ship at least. Maybe the ship was the catalyst needed for the development of more robust FTL technology? 17:48, February 23, 2017 (UTC)